It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing number 30 today for this Columbus Day

slash Indigenous People's Day and Thanksgiving Day season. It's 100 years of fighting for

indigenous people's stories to be told and recognized in the United States. Fall is the season

with Columbus Day slash Indigenous People's Day

and Thanksgiving when teachers have to figure out how to teach the history in probably very

different ways when they were kids and students, certainly different from 100 years ago.

For example, I bet most of you didn't know that it was exactly 100 years ago,

1924, that Congress passed the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 that declared all Native Americans

born on U.S. soil to be United States citizens. Imagine that. It took until 1924 for the settlers and the descendants of the settlers who took

all the native people's lands to say they could all be citizens of the country that was established

over them. And ironically, according to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American

Indian, it was right about the same time, late 1920s,

that colleges and universities started to name their mascots

for Indians, quote unquote, or native-related symbols.

Meanwhile, Columbus might have sailed the ocean blue in 1492, but it wasn't until 1934 that Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt made Columbus Day a national holiday.

It's not like it was in the Declaration of Independence or something.

As a history on CNN tells it, as waves of Italian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they face prejudice and discrimination.

To combat negative perceptions, a group of Italian-American elites took up the cause of Columbus Day,

arguing that the contributions of Italian immigrants had helped make America the nation it was.

The movement to, so that was from CNN, the movement to reclaim Columbus Day as Indigenous

...